9. Mud Happens
Mud Happens
NICK
The sheets had gone cold on her side of the bed.
Juliette was a bare curve against me, her breathing settled into a low, even cadence. I didn’t move. My arm was trapped under the weight of her waist.
I’m going to regret this by sunrise.
“Well,” she said.
Her voice was a low rasp, stripped of the polish she used like a weapon during the day.
I laughed—didn't sound like me—and lifted my head to look at her. She looked like a mistake I might make again.
“Well,” I agreed. “That’s one word for it.”
“I’m usually more articulate.”
“I’ve noticed.” I traced the line of her hip. Her skin was cooling, heat still there under my hand. “You’re also usually more clothed. I think I prefer you like this.”
Her gaze slipped past my shoulder. “Don’t get used to it,” she said.
“I’m in your bed, Juliette. I’m aware this is temporary.”
“I meant the naked part.”
“Noted. But as long as you’re at Mara Khaya, you’re under my watch.”
She shifted closer. “I should—”
“No.”
The word snapped through the quiet. I went still, my jaw tightening as the echo died. “It’s late. The leopard’s done for the night. We might as well stay put.”
She didn’t argue. She just settled against me, her back to my chest. I wrapped my arm around her. Her pulse was a steady, grounding thrum against my palm.
Didn’t match mine.
I didn’t sleep for a long time. I just watched the shadows move across the ceiling. By the time the first gray light crept under the curtains, it felt simple. I slipped out of bed carefully, easing my arm free without waking her.
The bush didn’t wait for morning just because I wanted more time.
I left a note on the bedside table.
A lie, but a necessary one. Didn’t need to make things awkward.
You snore.
Also, your tactical awareness while sleeping is zero. See you at breakfast. – N
The pillow would tell her I’d stayed. It wouldn’t tell her I’d spent two hours awake, watching her breathe instead of sleeping. I didn’t put that in the note.
The lodge would have her on the activity schedule by breakfast anyway.
Outside, the bush was already waking up. The air carried the dry scent of bark and peppery scrub, the faint calls of birds threading through the trees.
Work helped.
Elephants near the south pan. Camera traps checked. Fence line intact—same as yesterday.
By midmorning I cut back toward the lodge clearing. Voices drifted through the trees before I reached the edge of the open ground.
Guests.
A small group clustered around one of the junior guides. Cameras, hats, wide-brimmed optimism.
And Juliette.
There she was. Right in the middle of it.
She stood near the center of the group, sunglasses on, arms folded, studying the ground with the focus of someone reviewing a business report.
She looked exactly like she had the first day. Composed. Untouchable. The problem was, I knew better now.
The guide crouched. “Impala. What do you notice about their tracks?”
Juliette leaned in. “The spacing is inconsistent,” she observed, pointing a manicured finger at the dirt.
Same finger.
Same neat little nail.
Different terrain last night.
Christ.
“And the depth on the right-hand column doesn't match the left. They didn’t just change direction. Something broke the pattern.”
The guide blinked.
That hadn’t gone the way he expected.
I stayed in the shadows. She shouldn't have been able to catch the shift. Those were light prints, obscured by cross-winds, but she’d found the exact moment the herd’s logic broke.
Another look. She was right. The spacing tightened, the front prints angling sharply toward the brush.
The guide looked up, his face a silent plea for an intervention.
Any decent ranger would have stepped in. Instead, I watched her turn a simple tracking lesson into cross-examination.
That voice.
Against my mouth last night.
I stepped out of the shade. “She’s right.”
Juliette didn't look back at me. She studied the dirt, her finger hovering over a blurred indentation. “How can you tell? The edge is smeared.”
“Because they’re impala, Juliette. They’re the professional neurotics of the bush. They panic for sport.”
Sweat gathered at the hollow of her throat. I forced my attention back to the tracks before memory got creative.
She finally looked up, her mouth giving nothing away beneath the sunglasses. “That feels like an underdeveloped theory.”
The impala would be crushed to hear their survival instinct was a rounding error.
I crouched beside her, the heat from the red dust rising between us. I pointed to the marks. “Two toes. Narrow split. Light weight. That’s the whole story.”
“And the variance in the soil displacement?” she asked, pointing to a jagged break in the crust.
“A rock, Juliette. It stepped on a pebble and had a momentary crisis of identity.”
She stared at the tracks like she was about to put the entire ecosystem on a Performance Improvement Plan.
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
She leaned back on her heels, considering the dirt as if it had failed a stress test. “Hm.”
I nodded, moving on.
“The group’s bottlenecking at the trailhead,” Juliette observed, checking her watch with a frown. She pointed to a steep, grassy bank that bypassed the main queue of guests. “If we take that secondary slope, we cut the transit time to the river by 10 minutes.”
“That’s not a path,” I said, stepping out from the trees. “That’s a silt drainage.”
She didn’t spare me a glance. Just adjusted her sunglasses, her eyes fixed on the bank. “It’s a fifteen-degree incline with established root systems, Nick. It’s an efficiency gain.”
“It’s a mud trap, Juliette.”
“I’ll take my chances with the logistics.”
She stepped onto the least suspicious patch of ground.
The ground didn't just give way—it liquefied. The shelf of silt vanished beneath her boots. There was a wet, heavy thwack.
Then silence.
For a heartbeat, she froze—a strategist realizing the market had just shifted. Then gravity took over.
Juliette Wilder—negotiator, professional optimizer—slid three feet down the slope and landed squarely in the muck.
The group went silent.
Well, shit.
She sat there for a moment, perfectly still. No flailing. No gasping. She just stared at the point where the bank had failed her.
Then she brushed a strand of hair off her face and looked up at me. “The slope angle,” she said, her voice as calm as a recorded deposition, “combined with the soil saturation created an unexpected shift in traction.”
I stared at her.
“That’s a lot of words for a woman who just ate a mouthful of riverbank.”
She didn't flinch. “And you’re spending a lot of time standing up there enjoying the view. Are you going to help me up, or just keep scouting the wreckage?”
I laughed. Raw. Wrong for a guided tour.
Didn't care.
Juliette watched me like I was a new species. “You’re enjoying this,” she said.
“Immensely.”
The guide offered a hand. She took it, mud streaking one leg.
She should have looked ridiculous. She looked furious, filthy, and beautiful enough to make my judgment unreliable.
“Well,” she said, brushing her palms. “If anyone asks, this was field research.”
“You learn fast.”
“I prefer controlled environments.”
“You chose poorly.”
She glanced at the mud. “I’m starting to notice.”
A sound rose from the mud beside her boot, low and wet and deeply unimpressed.
Juliette went still. “Tell me that was a bird.”
I looked down.
An African bullfrog sat half-submerged in the muck, broad as a salad plate and wearing the expression of a retired magistrate who had seen enough procedural incompetence for one morning.
“Bullfrog,” I said.
Juliette looked at it. The frog looked back, then released another obscene, gravelly croak.
For one clean second, Juliette Wilder lost the war with her own face.
Not a laugh. Worse.
A snort.
She shut it down immediately, but I’d heard it.
So had the frog.
“Noted,” she said, straightening with what dignity she had left. “The witness is hostile.”
I had to look away.
Mud suited her.
Back down, Mercer.
I left before lunch.
Didn’t shake it all afternoon.
By the time the sun dropped behind the trees and the guests gathered at the fire, whatever I’d held onto all day was wearing thin.
I found her. Firelight catching in that dark, copper-streaked hair. She’d traded the mud for a dress that skimmed instead of concealed.
The dress was a suggestion, not a covering. My pulse didn't just spike.
It damn near redlined.
Whatever discipline I'd built all day came apart in one breath.
She held a glass of wine like it was a shield. People talked around her. She didn’t join in. “You look like you’re counting the minutes,” I said.
She glanced up. “Running out of small talk.”
“Same.”
I jerked a thumb toward the darker edge of the clearing. “Come with me.”
She followed. We moved past the last chair, the firelight fading into the silver-black of the bush. The sound of the group dropped away, replaced by the soft scrape of seed heads.
No one watching.
“You left early,” she said.
“Morning sweep.” I shrugged. “Also I wasn’t sure what the morning protocol was.”
“What protocol?”
“For waking up next to you.”
I stopped walking. Too late to pull that back. The admission hung in the air, heavier than the morning humidity.
“And now?” she asked.
I turned to face her. “Now I’m wondering if one night was a risk I shouldn’t have taken.”
“Regretting your fieldwork already?”
“Because one night is a fluke.” I took a step, cutting the distance by half. “Two is a problem.”
She didn't flinch. She didn't move at all.
“And I’ve never been good,” I said, stepping into her space until the heat of her was a physical weight, “at leaving a problem half-finished.”
The air between us was heavy with woodsmoke and the sharp, dark edge of the Malbec. It was a physical intake.
“I’ve spent twelve hours trying not to remember the sounds you made.”
Her gaze held. Then her pulse jumped—a frantic, tiny thrum in the hollow of her throat.
“And?”
“And I’m done trying.”
She stepped into my space, her chest nearly brushing mine. “Then stop talking. Take me back and get me out of this dress before I change my mind.”
I didn’t need the order twice. My hand locked onto the small of her back. The silk was a thin, useless barrier. I pulled her flush against the heat she’d started.
“Protocol’s dead, Juliette.”
We didn't walk back to the jeep.
We moved.